"Seventh Soul Skill, Martial Soul Avatar!"
After being hounded for so long, Evil Dragon could no longer stand the harassment and unleashed his Martial Soul Avatar.
His rank-93 Soul Power made the blood serpent behind him tower a full thirty meters high. The instant his avatar appeared, it blasted Huo Yuhao's ten throwing knives away, while the sixth, black Soul Ring on his body lit up. (Combat strength follows Douluo II. Xuan Zi, a Limit Douluo, has a thousand-meter-tall Martial Soul phantom, so I only dared give a rank-93 one thirty meters. Better to play it safe.)
His legs suddenly joined together, transforming into an enormous serpent's tail. With a swing of that tail, his body shot toward Huo Yuhao at tremendous speed.
Unfortunately for him, Huo Yuhao was hardly going to let him have his way. He was just as fast as lightning and immediately widened the distance between them.
Huo Yuhao retreated while kiting Evil Dragon.
Scattered attacks were ineffective against Evil Dragon, so Huo Yuhao gathered all his throwing knives together. The tips of the ten blades pressed tightly together, spinning at high speed with such terrifying force that they seemed ready to tear space apart.
To improve his control, Huo Yuhao made the throwing knives spin directly in his hand. Moving as though he could shift forms and exchange shadows, he instantly appeared behind Evil Dragon.
Above the enormous blood serpent phantom's head, the throwing knives in Huo Yuhao's hand plunged into its body like an unstoppable power drill, carrying a terrifying 160,000 kilograms of force. The blood serpent's form was as fragile as tofu. Huo Yuhao drove his fist deep into it in an instant, and the blades began wreaking havoc inside.
"Aaargh...!"
Evil Dragon let out an agonized scream below him. His Martial Soul was linked to his heart, so naturally, he could feel the pain as Huo Yuhao savaged its phantom.
"Ninth Soul Skill, Ten Thousand Dragons Devour Souls!"
Wracked with pain, Evil Dragon activated his ninth, red Soul Ring to escape Huo Yuhao's shameless assault. Then an astonishing sight unfolded.
His enormous blood serpent suddenly turned into countless little blood serpents, which scattered toward the corpses on the ground. After devouring all his recently slain subordinates while their bodies were still warm, the blood serpents instantly returned. A considerable amount of baleful blood energy gathered around him, and even his Soul Power rose by one rank, though only temporarily.
Seeing the blood serpents scatter, Huo Yuhao spread his throwing knives out to pursue them. But when Evil Dragon saw him divide his forces, he willed the blood serpents to merge. When Huo Yuhao concentrated his strength again, Evil Dragon scattered them once more.
"Getting smarter?"
"Your Martial Soul can even eat corpses? Evil Soul Masters really are miles ahead."
Huo Yuhao scoffed. He could tell that after consuming those Soul Masters' corpses, the Titled Douluo Evil Dragon had received a bizarre increase in strength.
Splitting his attention to control the throwing knives was now useless, so he simply stopped and left them floating quietly around him. Meanwhile, he began preparing himself for an explosive burst.
A hideous smile of absolute control appeared on Evil Dragon's face. The fellow before him had inflicted such devastating losses that nothing short of skinning him and tearing out his tendons could quell the hatred in his heart.
Closer. Closer still.
"Die, you little bastard!" Evil Dragon roared, venting his fury as his serpent-scaled arms reached straight for the seemingly helpless Huo Yuhao.
With a slice, two smooth, perfectly even cuts suddenly appeared across Evil Dragon's wrists.
The sound of his hands hitting the ground rang out together with his screams.
His pig-slaughtering squeals almost made Huo Yuhao want to cover his ears. Since the cuts had severed his arteries, torrents of blood immediately gushed from the smooth cross sections, splattering the saber in Huo Yuhao's hand.
The sixth layer of the Ninefold Thunder Blade amplified his entire body's power by nearly five times, while his Spirit Eyes' gold-level second awakening provided a threefold boost. With a total fifteenfold amplification, he instantly unleashed a terrifying force of over 500,000 kilograms.
That was already comparable to the full force of Tang San's Sea God Trident. At such close range, with Evil Dragon completely unprepared, this strike truly shattered ten thousand techniques with sheer strength, unstoppable in its path.
With both hands severed, Evil Dragon had already lost his composure. Huo Yuhao's amplification still had time left; a three-minute boost was more than enough to finish him off. In battle, once someone began to falter, defeat was not far away, because momentum truly mattered.
Evil Dragon used all his Soul Power to staunch the bleeding and contain his injuries. At the same time, he desperately tried to put distance between himself and Huo Yuhao. Unfortunately, distance meant nothing before a Psychic Master.
Huo Yuhao streaked like lightning toward the fleeing Evil Dragon, while his ten spinning throwing knives pursued him like phantoms. The two raced through the cave, one fleeing and the other chasing, and soon reached its end.
He fled, Huo Yuhao pursued, and even wings could not have carried him to safety.
Like a war god, Huo Yuhao crackled with lightning, his terrifying saber poised to cleave down. Evil Dragon could no longer spare any thought for his wounded hands and condensed his battered blood serpent phantom once again.
He poured all his Soul Power into his Martial Soul Avatar, hoping to strengthen the blood serpent's defenses enough to withstand this attack from a living god of slaughter.
Unfortunately, things did not go as he wished. Huo Yuhao's strike, laden with terrifying force, easily cleaved Evil Dragon's Martial Soul Avatar-now reduced to barely a dozen meters-in two. The blade continued onward, stopping only an inch from the space between Evil Dragon's brows.
"Any last words? You're the first Titled Douluo I've killed, so this is quite a milestone. I'll let you say a few words, and I'll listen carefully. But you only have one minute!"
Seeing Evil Dragon desperately flee deeper underground, Huo Yuhao had thought he still had another trump card. As it turned out, he had simply been fleeing blindly in a panic.
Having subdued Evil Dragon in one fell swoop, Huo Yuhao promptly indulged in a trait peculiar to villains while his amplification was still active: talking too much.
After all, this was his first benchmark, and Evil Dragon really had helped him a great deal. Huo Yuhao felt that both reason and sentiment demanded he offer some compensation.
Then I'll let him die with a little dignity.
"If you kill me, the Holy Cult will hunt you down like mad."
When Evil Dragon saw Huo Yuhao stop what he was doing and start saying inexplicable things, he immediately felt a glimmer of hope and began threatening him.
"So your last words are just trash talk? That pack of Evil Soul Masters in the Holy Spirit Cult would avenge a companion? Has your brain short-circuited?"
Huo Yuhao shook his head, feeling sorry for Evil Dragon. He might have been able to leave him an intact corpse. What a shame.
With one slash through Evil Dragon's neck, Huo Yuhao ended his wicked life. In truth, his main goal was withdrawal points. After he killed that first Soul King Evil Soul Master, 32 withdrawal points had appeared in his trading interface. Killing all twenty-four followers-five Soul Kings, ten Soul Emperors, eight Soul Saints, and one Soul Douluo-had earned him over two thousand withdrawal points.
Now, as Evil Dragon's head fell, another 800 points came in. Unfortunately, when he tried to exchange them for energy crystals from the Swallowed Star world-that is, Vegetation Spirits-it still displayed no specific amount and only informed him that he could not withdraw them.
Fine. Looks like the system never intended to let me exchange Swallowed Star's energy into Douluo and ascend to heaven in a single step.
Still, he came to terms with it. By exploiting a system loophole, he had already obtained the strongest cheat possible. As long as he focused on cultivating his Soul Power, he could still break through to Planetary Level. Thinking of it that way made him feel much better, and he could save his withdrawal points for the next world.
The Holy Spirit Cult's strength was indeed unfathomable. Searching through Evil Dragon's Storage Soul Tool, Huo Yuhao discovered that this dignified rank-93 Titled Douluo was actually no more than a deacon.
Above him was a Super Douluo superior who oversaw ten Holy Spirit branches of roughly equal strength to his. Evil Dragon himself was the gate master of the Evil Dragon Gate, the Holy Spirit Cult headquarters' branch stationed in the Star Luo Empire.
Evil Dragon's favorite activity was capturing children with serpent-type Martial Souls and sacrificing them to the evil dragon, hoping to obtain a holy son who awakened an evil dragon Martial Soul and brought glory to the Evil Dragon Cult. Unfortunately, his luck was rotten: Huo Yuhao happened to discover him and wipe out the whole nest.
"The Evil Dragon Cult? More like the Evil Snake Cult!"
(End of chapter)